To see beyond Essays

Journalist Badkhen (Bright Unbearable Reality) asks in these soul-stirring essays whether language can capture the enormity of grief and offer hope amid catastrophe. Through her travels across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, she explores how humans attempt to make sense of war and ecological destruction. Visits to ancient Lycia (now Turkey) and Auschwitz, two sites of mass death, prompt Badkhen to think about humanity's tendency to mythologize past natural and man-made disasters through statistics and storytelling. But present-day violence evades meaning: "I cannot, for example, come up with any story that rationalizes the genocide in Palestine." When Badkhen travels to see an old friend in Mali, where a militia has massacred ethnic Fulani herders, she asks about the violence, and the friend goes silent. Badkhen speculates that there are no words for such bloodshed, that "maybe it is immoral to have the words for it." Reflecting on nature writer Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, she is reminded of literature's ability to inspire awe and concludes that the role of the writer is not to help people be less afraid but to remind them "that, somehow, we have remembered to keep going." Grounded in plain prose, Badkhen's narrative achieves the difficult task of emanating authority and moral force without lecturing. The result is a quietly moving tribute to survivors of global upheaval. (Apr.)